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ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

These images, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, show an arc of blue
light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion
light-years away.

The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant star-forming galaxy
whose light is distorted by the monster cluster's powerful gravity, an effect
called gravitational lensing. The "lensed" galaxy existed 10 billion to 13
billion years ago.

The arc, located within the small box, is barely visible in the Hubble image
of the cluster, named IDCS J1426.5+3508. A close-up image of the arc is shown
in the inset. The images were taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 in 2010.

The cluster is the most massive found at that epoch, weighing as much as 500
trillion suns. The assemblage is 5 to 10 times larger than other clusters
found at such an early time in the universe's history. This unique system
constitutes the most distant cluster known to "host" a giant gravitationally
lensed arc.

Object Name: IDCS J1426.5+3508

Image Type: Astronomical/Illustration

Credit:NASA, ESA, and A. Gonzalez (University of Florida, Gainesville), A. Stanford (University of California, Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and M. Brodwin (University of Missouri-Kansas City and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)